“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”~ Ronald Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981

3VOLUTION 2: Esser v Wilbur Debate. Only a matter of style?

According to political tradition a trailing candidate calls for debates and a leading candidate avoids them because they can change things.

So when late in the Washington State GOP Chair race, incumbent Luke Esser’s side announced debates, it raised eyebrows. After all, incumbents usually win Party office contests in Washington. And Esser’s opponent was a talk show host and experienced convention chairman; poised, glib,confident. Those of us who saw him in action in the 80’s know Kirby’s radio career was no accident. He has long been skilled in articulating conservative ideas. He is not the kind of guy you want to engage in verbal confrontations about GOP issues unless absolutely necessary. And Kirby said the debate was set up among the other three candidates without consulting him.

The move suggested that Luke was trailing, knew it, and had exhausted all other options.

There is no race for office I know of where the mind of the electorate is so readable. A candidate could contact every eligible voter by phone in a day. The candidates usually campaign by making those calls.

Luke had to know. It is rumored that Kirby, perhaps in deference to conventional Dino Rossi-style wisdom, even considered not attending.

Then suddenly the day before the debate, the SeattleTimes, the leading organ of the liberal movement in Washington, came out at the last hour for Luke. I can’t remember Seattle Times pre-election coverage of any GOP State Chairman’s race , much less an endorsement. This was an emergency for the left. Rumor has it that State Attorney General Rob McKenna (whom the Times also loves) essentially wrote the editorial himself. According to the Times Esser’s reelection was necessary to prevent McKenna from having to face a primary contest in the 2012 Governor’s race.

Get that.

They implied that McKenna, to win the Governor’s race, needed Esser to cheat for him (although, of course, they didn’t point out that it was cheating), using the Chairman’s office to prevent other candidates from running and they so much as announced that Luke could be counted on to do it.

“Working seamlessly” together.

In the 2008 convention process Luke and Robbie had been as corrupt and effective a pair as you could wish, working together, literally violating Party rules and State Laws, and openly asserting, both, their right to do so and the obligation of “loyal Republicans” to fall in line. The results were electoral disaster. No wonder the SeattleTimes loves them.

Last Saturday morning they worked together in the Congressional District caucuses.

Luke and the other three candidates for State chair were making the rounds to each meeting and each was allowed to make a speech for their candidacy. But Esser got two speeches. Because McKenna (but no other elected official), as “Attorney General” was afforded a speech in each meeting and used it solely to campaign for the incumbent, his friend and ally, who had worked seamlessly with him in 2008 to openly violate the Notwithstanding Clause of RCW 29A.80.020.

But Luke had already lost the race in Friday night’s debate… where I left our narrative.

Where, in that jungle festooned cocktail glass of a hotel, was the debate?

The hotel’s event board listed the function as a “Candidate forum,” with a room name but no “map.” I left Kirby’s suite to cruise the hotel meeting rooms. I found the debate location, still empty more than a half hour before its scheduled start, but it was clouded by the past. Standing in that room at that hour for that purpose I got a strange feeling… like I had been taken back to re-live unfinished events six years old. I had stood right there six years ago. The room where the debate would be held was the same where we held the Reagan Wing debate in 2005. It was more than just my feeling. There was a clear meaning to the synchronicity I’ll discuss later.

The room was packed and the debate was “guided” by Rob McKenna protege (Sammamish city council member and former KING5 Evening Magazine host) John Curley, upon whose face is permanently fixed an engaging smile. They divided the room between the high and exalted State Committee members and the ordinary people, among whom there was an enormous majority who had already made up their mind on Kirby. They waved signs and cheered when he was introduced which spun Curley into action. He said, “Should we hold all applause until after the debate and not wave signs, whaddya think?” as if putting a parliamentary question to the body. Esser’s followers all said “Aye!” and Curley said, “Well, I guess that’s what we’re doing” as if he had just passed a motion. He never asked for those opposed. This kind of cheating to manipulate is precisely the reason Henry Robert INVENTED his Rules of Order. And Curley’s gross partiality replicates the manner in which Luke Esser ran the election for State Convention Chair in 2010, only allowing ONE of two nominees to be voted on, ironically cheating, at that time, for…. um… Kirby Wilbur.

The debate format was simple. The four candidates answered questions (some from State Committee members in the audience) put to them by Curley, with varying times for response.

There were no earthshaking questions.

None, in fact, that betrayed any inkling of the changes necessary to make the Republican Party competitive in Washington State. They were the same questions with the same expected pat answers that are dragged out every two to four years.

How can we do better? We need to reach out.

How do we reach out better? We need to involve the groups.

How can we do that better? We need embrace new technologies.

What else? We need to improve Voter Vault. We need to raise more money.

Curt Fackler

We need to do the same things, over and over again but do them better. Incumbents say that they did well because they did these things and challengers say they didn’t do them adequately.

Neither “Outsider” (and McKenna supporter) Bill Rennie nor former Spokane County chair Curt Fackler (who withdrew from the race Saturday morning) seemed like serious candidates. They had no hospitality suites, no creative agendas, no compelling credentials. And they made no serious criticism of Esser.

In fact, during this debate all the candidates were complimentary to Luke. Luke himself was especially complimentary. Each challenger was asked whether if they had been chair, could Patty Murray have been replaced in the Senate. They all said they could NOT have done any better than Esser. [I could have. We should have won that Senate seat.] But even while giving the same answer, Kirby Wilbur set himself apart. He said that we lost that race because Dino Rossi was passionless and had a weak message. Bulls-eye.

But there were two earthshaking responses.

The second wasfrom Bill Rennie answering a question designed for Esser. “Are you an elitist?” Offering personal evidence to the contrary, Rennie began with:

“My great grandmother was a Cherokee whore!”

But the first earthshaking response came from Kirby Wilbur. It was his opening speech.

He talked about what had been done in other States, States that turned the tide, that not only won a new seat here or there, but that won the MAJORITY of seats in their State legislatures, that won a Governor’s race, a Senate seat, States where Republicans had become the majority party. Asserting that we could and actually should win in Washington, the speech was a tacit challenge to the pragmatic philosophical assumption underlying the whole party/campaign philosophy of “Mainstream Republicans of Washington,” its candidates, and its proxy State chairs since 1980 (Jennifer Dunn, Ben Bettridge, Ken Eikenberry, Dale Foreman, Chris Vance, Diane Tebelius and Luke Esser), the argument that justifies their losses: that this is the Liberal’s State and we can’t win until we become more like them.

The speech itself, as well as its delivery, reminded me of a speech (by a Reagan-era speechwriter) George Bush gave in a Presidential debate with Al Gore, perhaps the best of his career: “They had their chance. They [did] not [lead]. We will.” The speech won the debate. I told Kirby afterward that his was the best speech I had ever heard by a Republican Party administrative officer. (He did not disagree.) I asked him if it had been written (hoping to be able to publish it here). He said that it was extemporaneous, but that it was easy to do because it was the message he had been delivering to the State Committee officers when he called them. I shared my assessment that if he did not win the chairmanship based on that message, there was not much hope for the Republican Party.

He agreed(!)

We will never know how much of the debate that was the State Chair race was won on the telephone even before Friday. But we saw the outcome of the debate the following day, on the first ballot. Wilbur 69, Esser 36, Rennie 7.

Yet, they are very close, Luke and Kirby.

In an interview on Monday, in answer to whether his election was a move to the right, Kirby told us “No I see it as something else. Luke Esser and I are good friends. We were good friends before I ran against him, we’re good friends now…I don’t think Luke Esser or I are any more or less conservative than each other… It’s not a move to the right, it was a rejection of a particular style of leadership and a replacement with another, that’s all it was.”

More’s the pity. Luke’s slavish devotion to the left wing of the Party, to Mainstream Republicans of Washington and their favored candidates, has been the hallmark of his administration. But, to be fair, Kirby made that statement on a radio interview and in response to early 2012 liberal spin by Democrat media, the Times, PI, and Stranger.

I suppose we can hold out hope he is lying.

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But recall I noted a spiritual subtext to the evening’s events.

Kirby’s suite was in the same room Rose Strong’s had occupied six years ago . Luke Esser held forth in the same room where six years earlier, Chris Vance had taken advantage of having the State Party budget pay for a “wine and cheese” reception that functioned as his re-election hospitality suite. To find the debate room of January 2011, I walked down the same hallway where I have vivid memories of our preparations in January 2005, the year the Reagan Wing hosted State Chair candidate debates. The podium was in virtually the same place, although it and the chairs were facing a different direction. It was the same “election eve” in the same hotel.

And there, during the debate, was the same Fredi Simpson standing in virtually the same spot she had stood six years ago REFUTING BY HER EVERY ACT, everything she had said and done in 2005.

In 2004/05, as State Party Vice Chair, Fredi opposed the very idea of State Chair debates. Contacted directly by phone, she claimed that they were AGAINST PARTY RULES (that she was, of course, incapable of producing). She stood solidly behind liberal State Party Chair, Chris Vance’s intent to dodge the first three and when he walked in late, violated the rules, refused to answer questions, physically seized the microphone to commandeer the meeting and refused to yield to the moderator, Fredi was a direct accomplice, literally shouting down the legitimate moderator and refusing to allow anyone else to speak. It was brutal, thuggish, criminal. But it favored her faction.

In 2011, Fredi was an organizer of the format that in 2005 she had claimed was against the rules.

In 2011 Fredi supported equal treatment of the candidates that in 2005 her criminal behavior made impossible.

In 2011 Fredi supported the moderator’s authority to run the debate that in 2005 she had literally prevented.

For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.

Matthew 12:37

But there was much more justice than that in the evening and its synchronicity. When we conceived the debates in 2004, we believed that it could open the door to PCOs understanding how the State Party Chair is chosen. Most hadn’t a clue. We believed the

grassroots would learn how the State Committee functions and the proper role of their State Committee man and State Committee woman. We believed that holding debates would break the stranglehold that a long string of Party insiders (and failed public office candidates) had on the Chair position.

We believed that holding public debates among candidates for State GOP Chair would open the door to grassroots control of that office.

Everything we said has come true…

…and they did it to themselves.

Among the rules Curley attempted to impose on the audience was secrecy. He didn’t want Republicans sharing the debate’s proceedings. That approach replicates the cult-like secrecy of Executive Board and Committee meetings

under the Esser/McKenna regime and among their allies.

The secrecy has been broken. The snow has begun to melt. The grassroots are engaged.

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4 Responses

Good start! Now, is there a Parliamentarian with the guts to enforce Robert’s Rules so the dirty tricks squad is sidelined permanently?

Lovable goof-balls like John Curley have their place, schlepping solar panels in tv commercials and doing quirky little travelogues on local tv. It’s an insult and slap in the face, pandering the assumed “rube-ness” of honest PCOs when they facilitate events of such significance to the future of a political party of the State of Washington.